Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't possess a company and don't have any interest in Internet marketing (perhaps you don't even know what that's), if you have email address, you have experienced the uglier side of email marketing. You've probably seen the ads for email address lists that offer thousands-or even millions-of email addresses. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with so many addresses?
You can be sure of just one thing: when the price is cheap, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these huge lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They have been equivalent to a list of street addresses chosen from your telephone book.
There's no phone book so where do these cheapo lists come from? Largely, the addresses are picked from forums, student or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, as well as other areas where people gather to innocently swap advice. They don't know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. And they definitely did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Harvesting email addresses is legal. But it's widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. But you might damage your company, possibly irreparably. The potential outcomes for violating the unwritten rule from losing your ISP to having your business blacklisted to losing your domain.